#365papers How do we make sense of the world as scientists?

Hello everyone ! I am Paulette known in the twitter-sphere as @pinkyprincess. I originally majored in Chemical Engineering and worked in an organic synthesis lab for three years as an undergrad. I taught middle school chemistry for a year and realized I wanted to find out more about how kids understand and perceive science. Currently, I am a first-year graduate student in a Ph.D on Learning Sciences and Policy at University of Pittsburgh with a focus on children and adolescent relationship with science. If you want to know more about my thoughts on chemical and science education, or if you want to read about my experiences as a hard scientist now social scientist and my identity conflict you know where to find me.

Pietro G-L was very kind and asked me to edit the first #365papers collection. I’ll be presenting my work on scientific reasoning and argumentation on a poster at a conference in March, and that inspired me to write this post.

We as scientists try to make sense of the world around us. This may seem like a very simplistic explanation of what the scientific endeavor entitles, but it is certainly something we all have in common no matter which area of science we belong to. The following, but no limited to, skills can construct the way we do it:

Generating Questions

Evaluating Evidence

Design of Investigations

Argumentation

Nature of Science

I chose the papers based on twitter description and abstract that exemplified each of them (though every research activity uses all of them). I hope this not only reflects the complexity that constitutes what we call a community “science” and at the same time remember the things we all have in common. Also hope this helps us connect with researchers outside our fields.

1. Generating Questions – Posing investigable questions and recognizing there is a gap of knowledge.